NEWS & ACHIEVEMENTS

Three Computer Science students Chen Qian (PhD, Year 1), Nian Ke (BSc in Computer Science, Year 3) and Peng Yuhan (BSc in Computer Science, Year 1) won the First Runner-up Award at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Collegiate Programming Contest (Hong Kong) held on 16 June 2012. Together they solved four out of six challenging problems in programming to clinch the award from among more than 30 participating teams from 10 institutions in Hong Kong and Macau.

Delighted on receiving the award, Peng Yuhan said, “We worked together extremely well as a team and I believe this was an important factor in our success. I was nervous during the last 30 minutes of the contest while my teammates remained calm and focused, which helped me maintain a good state of mind for the rest of the competition. I have learned a lot from them, both in programming and performing well in a competition.”

Dr. Chu Xiaowen, Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science, who acted as the team’s coach, was delighted at the students’ achievement. He said, “The last 30 minutes of the competition was most challenging and determined which team would clinch the award. The HKBU team’s outstanding performance reflected that this could never have been done without great team spirit. I am proud of them.”

The annual ACM Collegiate Programming Contest (Hong Kong) is a team-based computer programming competition organised by the ACM Hong Kong Chapter. Each team is assigned a computer and six challenging programming problems. The team has to design and write computer programmes to solve as many of these problems as possible in four hours.